Mojave Crossing (1964) (10 page)

"He'd better hurry. My friends are coming."

She said nothing to that, for now we could hear the drum of the horses' hoofs.

"If you change your mind," I said, "you come to me. Seems a shame, a pretty girl like you, mixed up with this crowd."

She started to reply, then tightened her lips.

There were twenty wiry, tough-looking vaqueros with Roderigo, and they looked disappointed when it proved there would be no fight.

"You had better come away with us," Roderigo said, "Old Ben wishes to see you."

"Ben Mandrin?"

"Si." He smiled. "And the Se@norita Robiseau."

Chapter
Six.

The house was a long adobe with several doors opening on a veranda. The place was old and mellow. There were some huge old oaks about, and a few sycamores. The shade was a welcome thing after the long ride's heat, and I pulled up there and sat my saddle a minute or two, just looking around.

If they didn't take it away from Old Ben, this place might become Roderigo's, and I didn't blame him for wanting it. There was a feeling of lazy good will about it, from the smell of the barnyard and the jasmine around the house to the shade of the huge old trees.

The house was L-shaped and rambling, and opened on a view that showed the sea away off to the west-- just a hint of it beyond the round shoulder of a hill. In between was grassland, brown now and parched from the drouth, with here and there a cultivated patch of corn or beans, or some other row crop.

A door opened and, looking past my horse's head, I saw Dorinda standing there, wearing a lovely dress and looking more beautiful than she'd a right to.

"Won't you get down and come in? Mr.

Mandrin would like to see you."

She turned. "Juan, will you take care of the gentleman's horse?"

Stepping down from the saddle, I whipped dust from my clothes with my hat and walked across the yard.

The feeling up my spine warned me that somebody was watching--not Dorinda, and not Juan.

She held out her hand to me, smiling with her lips. It was a wide, pretty smile showing beautiful teeth, but her eyes did not smile.

They were cautious, somewhat worried eyes.

"Thank you, Mr. Sackett. Thank you very much for all you did. When they came to get me we thought you were dead."

"Handy," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Otherwise they might have made sure."

She let her eyes rest on my face a moment longer, as if trying to judge how smart I was, or how dangerous. ...

"It was all a mistake."

"There's men dead out there on the Mojave would be surprised to hear it," I said bluntly.

When she started to answer me I cut her short. "Ma'am, I didn't come to call on you. I came to see Ben Mandrin."

His voice came deep and booming. "And so you shall! Come in, Mr. Sackett! Please come in!"

He was sitting in a great old rocker, and whatever I had expected a pirate to look like, it was not this. He had never been tall--not like me, anyway--but he was broad-shouldered, and my guess was that he had once been a mighty powerful man. It showed in the size of his bones. His wrists were as large as mine, which are ten inches around, and he had strong, well-made hands, flat across the knuckles ... a fighter's hands.

He had a broad, heavily boned face and deep-set eyes; his heavy shock of black hair was mixed with gray. He had to be upwards of seventy years old, but he didn't look it.

Only you could see at a glance that something was wrong with his legs. He had them covered by a blanket, but I could tell they were thin, almost like there was nothing there at all.

There was an old scar over one eye and another on his cheekbone, but he did not look sinister, as they say of such men. He looked like a strong old man who had lived a life.

He was old, all right, a body could see that, but I could see a whole sight more. Old as he was, and with those crippled legs, there was a lot of iron in him yet.

"So you're Sackett?" he said. "Dorry told me of you. You sound like a fighting man."

The scar over his eye held my attention, and he noticed it. "Saber," he said. "That was a long time ago, a lifetime away."

"Off Hatteras," I said, "and they thought it killed you."

Well, both of them were surprised. Dorinda turned sharply to look at me, and the old man caught the arms of his chair and pulled himself out of his slump. "Now how could you know that?" he said.

"There were few enough who knew."

"You raided the Carolina coast too often,"

I said. "The man who gave you that cut over the eye was my grandfather."

He glared at me for a minute, then he chuckled. "He was a fighter," he said. "Best hand with a blade I ever saw--butar one."

He took a good look at me. "There's another Sackett here. Is he kin of yours?"

"I reckon. He's a Clinch Mountain Sackett, and we don't hold with them ... but we aren't pirates."

There was a mighty hard look in those eyes of his ... gave a man something to think about. Had he been a younger or even a healthier man, you'd think twice before giving sass to him. But I thought he liked this talk, and it came over me that it had probably been a time since anybody gave him back man-talk. Because of his wealth and his being crippled and all, they'd more than likely soft-talk him.

"That was a long time ago," Ben Mandrin said.

"I've become a rancher and a stable citizen."

His eyes glinted with a kind of tough humor. "Or hadn't you heard?"

"I heard, and I believe it ... up to a point."

He chuckled again and, glancing over at Dorinda, he said, "I like this man."

Then he turned his eyes back to me. "How'd you like to work for me?"

"I'm not hunting work. I'm hunting thirty pounds of gold that was taken from me, and when I find it I'm riding back to Arizona. And furthermore"--I looked right at Dorinda--

"I've got an idea who to ask about it."

Oh, he got it all right! Old Ben missed mighty little. He glanced at her, then back at me. "You're wrong, my friend--she has been with me."

He gestured toward a chair. "Sit down, and we'll talk a bit of ships and sabers and the Carolina coast fifty years ago ... or how much did your grandfather tell you?"

He turned to her. "Dorinda, bring us a bottle of wine--a very good bottle, that will bring memories around us."

We sat silent then, listening to her retreating footsteps. From the sound of them, the wine must have been somewhere at the far end of the house, and it was a great way off, it seemed.

"You helped her in the desert, Sackett, and for that I thank you."

Surprised, I was, for I'd been thinking he knew nothing of her leaving the pueblo. "I went for water, and when I started back, they had her. I stumbled as one of them shot at me, and he thought me dead."

"And you lay still? She does not know that I know."

He lighted a long black cheroot, then gave me a sharp glance. "Did she get your gold?"

"As to that, I couldn't say, but I would believe her a woman to know where gold was. I think"-I tried to put it so he would take no offense--

"she has a nose for gold, if you'll not mind my saying so."

She came back then, walking along the veranda toward us, and we sat silent, waiting. The bottle she brought was Madeira, of a kind they call Rainwater, although no storm that I have seen brought such water from the sky.

"I would have preferred Jamaica," he said, "but it is hard to come by in California."

We tasted the wine, and it was good. I thought him a fine old man, but I trusted the wine more than I did Old Ben Mandrin; and I trusted him a bit more than I did that black-eyed witch woman. Surely, I thought, this was a strange way for a tall and homely cowhand and miner to be treated, and it gave me an uncomfortable feeling to think that it was likely he would lose all this.

Roderigo had told me a little more during our ride from the pueblo to Greek George's ranch. Turner, the man from the bank, had relied on Dorinda to persuade Old Ben to sign the notes; and Turner would get cash from Dayton and his friends, while they would take over the note and get the ranch. Even without the note, they would have Old Ben lashed to the mast, for he was broke and down to his last bit of money.

The drought had ruined the crops and his range, and there was nothing left for him but to yield up the rancho ... but what would he do then, a crippled old man?

There was none of that in his talk now, for once the wine warmed his blood he talked of the old days off the Carolina coast, and of the fight with my grandfather. They had fought on a bloody deck--my grandfather being one of a make-up crew that had gone off to intercept him when there was no warship about equipped to handle the job. They had fought a desperate fight, with both men wounded and bleeding before the cut that felled Old Ben.

As we talked he kept his eyes on me, or looked off and seemed to be listening to the sound of my voice, although it was rare indeed that I had chance to speak. But it seemed to me there was something on his mind, something dark and secret that he held within himself.

Dorinda listened, and occasionally she went from the room and returned. I noticed she drank no wine ... was there purpose in that? Or did she simply not drink at all? Sometimes she seemed impatient, wishing me to be off, no doubt, for all of our talk was taking us no place.

It was in my own mind to leave, until suddenly Old Ben said, "You must stay the night, Sackett. You can snug down here--there's room enough and more. It will be time enough to go off hunting your gold in the morning."

He looked at me sharply as he replaced his glass on the table. "Roderigo said you had planned to buy mules or horses and pack goods back to the mines to sell. Is that still in your mind?"

"When I have my gold."

He waved his hand at the broad acres around me. "They plan to take all this from me, but there's mules enough, and I could let you have some ... for a small price. I'll have some run up for you to look upon."

He caught hold of his cane suddenly as if to get up, then stopped and said to Dorinda, "Tell them to come for me, and show Mr. Sackett to a room." He paused again as if thinking.

"To Pio's room," he added.

She looked surprised, but left the room, and when she came back two vaqueros came with her.

They picked Old Ben up, chair and all, and carried him from the room. When they had gone I finished my wine and put down the glass.

"I have never seen him like this," Dorinda said, puzzled and disturbed. "He has never talked so much to any stranger."

"It was because of the old times," I said. "My mention of the fight off Hatteras brought it all back to him."

Some of her puzzlement seemed to go away.

"Yes, yes, that must be it," she said.

She was a beautiful woman, but now I could see a coldness there that I had not noticed so much before, although I was ever wary of her.

"But in Pio's room!" she went on. "He has never allowed anyone in that room but the old governor."

"Pio Pico?"

"They were friends ... are still friends, I think, although he comes out but rarely now." And she said no more.

There were four of us at supper, Old Ben, Roderigo, Dorinda, and myself, but now Old Ben talked little. He broke in once to say, "There was some shooting around Mora, in New Mexico, in which some Sacketts were involved.

One of them married a Mexican girl."

"They are my brothers," I said.

He ate with good appetite, I noticed, but drank no more wine--only several cups of the blackest coffee this side of Hell itself. I drank my own share, but I was used to cow-camp coffee which will float a horseshoe.

Tired, I was, and ready for the bed, and we sat about very little after supper was over.

In my room was a huge old four-poster bed, the finest bed I had ever seen, and on a marble-topped table were a bowl and a pitcher of water.

There was a chair and a thick carpet on the stone-flagged floor. The room had one window, and an inner door that evidently connected with Old Ben's room.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I considered the situation, and none of it made sense. All I wanted was to get my gold back and get out on the trail back to the mines, yet here I was, a guest in an old Spanish hacienda, the guest of a former pirate.

True, I had my outfit back, but the country was filled with my enemies--and all through no fault of mine. Only trying to help a girl who, it now seemed, was tied in with my enemies ... enemies I'd made because of her.

Tired of trying to figure it out, and deciding I was pretty much of a fool, I pulled off my boots, washed my face and hands, and started to undress.

And then the door from Old Ben Mandrin's room opened and he stood there, hanging on a pair of crutches, and looking at me with devil's laughter in his eyes.

He swung himself around and lowered himself into the chair. "I need help, boy. I need your help."